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John Malkovich, with his brainy absurdist whine, has been crawling out on a limb of inspired flakiness for years now, but his best work — like the mad Color Me Kubrick — has struggled to make it onto the distribution radar. The Great Buck Howard gives Malkovich the showcase he deserves, and not just because it lets the actor fly as high, and loopy, as he likes (though it does, it definitely does). It’s that writer-director Sean McGinly has built a structure that grounds the Malk, letting him create a character with as much fascination as folly. His Buck Howard, a loving, fictionalized version of the Amazing Kreskin, is a former superstar of magic and ”mentalism” who has become a joke with a rubber handshake, a relic of the late ’60s and early ’70s, babbling on about his 61 appearances on The Tonight Show. Now, he performs to half-full theaters in places like Bakersfield (”I love this town!” he crows). Yet his act is still amazing. He can read people’s minds (or is it all a big fraud?), and that fusion of cheesiness and wonder is at the heart of the movie, which traces Buck’s brief, shining moment of Tony Bennett-like he’s-so-out-he’s-in resurgence. A winning Colin Hanks is the wide-eyed law-school dropout who becomes assistant and road manager to the now kindly, now cantankerous, possibly gay, lost-in-the-leisure-suit-era Buck, and Emily Blunt, as the publicist who signs on to stoke Buck’s comeback, has a perky radiance.

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The Great Buck Howard is in love with kitsch, with the backwaters of showbiz, and with genuine magic. At times, it’s like a more commercial version of an early Jonathan Demme film, but McGinly is also part of a new breed of director — a slick good-time humanist, like Juno’s Jason Reitman. These two may not quite be artists (at least, not yet), but a thriving movie culture needs all the filmmakers like them it can find.